


Grave-robbing

by sonictrowel



Series: Long Night in the Blue House [10]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Archaeology, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Plotty, Romance, Way more worldbuilding than I EVER intended when I started writing this damn story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-27 23:50:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10057490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonictrowel/pseuds/sonictrowel
Summary: Archaeology was bollocks already and they weren’t even in the cave yet.  When the Doctor had been in his mysterious-cavern-exploring days, they just parked the TARDIS inside, or at least right at the entrance, and no need to drag all this rubbish equipment along.  Some things, he was learning,  were better the long way round, but this was not shaping up to be one of them.





	

The Doctor was having a wonderful dream again.  His awareness was drifting in and out; it was dark and he felt so very comfortable and heavy, everything faded to a blur... but as he drifted back in, he noticed his lips were doing something without his brain’s help, and _that_ was very warm and soft and lovely.  And then he opened his eyes.

 “Morning, darling,” River murmured.  She was resting against his chest, the edge of her curls lined in silver starlight shining through the window and her face hovering near his, cast in shadow.

 “I’ll have you know, wife,” he said hoarsely, “that’s now the only way you’re allowed to wake me.” 

“Deal,” she said, snuggling into him.

“But... _why’re_ we awake?” He noticed with disinterest that his eyes had somehow closed again.

“The dig’s today, honey.  Early start.  Unless you’d prefer to stay home— I really don’t mind.”

The Doctor’s eyes shot open.  “No, no, I’m up!” he croaked, dragging himself into a seated position.  

River sat up beside him, eyeing him with slight concern.

His mind had rapidly booted up from the rush of adrenaline at her mention of the expedition.  

“Tea, love?” he asked, his voice still rough from sleep but full of affection.  

She studied him for a moment longer, but seemed to shake off what was worrying her. “Please,” she said, and leaned in to give him another of those soft, soft, sleepy kisses.   

He hummed in contentment against her lips.  His shoulders slumped toward her and his eyes began to get a little too comfortable being closed again and— “Mmmf,” he pulled away from her reluctantly, “Tea coming up.  Better get your gear on, Professor.”

“Can’t believe you’re really going to participate in _archaeology,_ ” she teased, slowly climbing out of bed and heading for the wardrobe.

“Just supervising,” he grumbled as he shuffled into his slippers.  “I know what kind of trouble you like to get into.”

“Oh,” she smirked, her voice particularly low in her lingering morning drowsiness, “I know you do.” 

He shot her a fond, scolding look over his shoulder and headed for the kitchen.

___

They met a gaggle of students and staff in a carpark on the university campus.  River briefly introduced him to her group and— after the usual ensuing confusion about what his name was and who was actually supposed to be addressed as “Doctor” and _no, darling, it would not help to clarify anything if we started going by Dr. and Doctor Song—_  they all piled onto some kind of glorified haywagon hitched onto the back of a buggy, crammed in along with an absurd amount of bulky equipment.  

It was brutally cold that ‘morning,’ the wind roaring and whipping across the flat plains as they rode out to the farm.  To be honest, it was always bloody cold and windy these days.  No one bothered much with speaking, preferring to focus on keeping warm, which was fine by the Doctor.  By the time the landscape began to slowly transition from red, rocky desert into slightly more arable soil with the occasional sparse group of short trees, everyone was huddled together.  River had let the Doctor pull her onto his lap and tuck her face into the raised collar of his heavy coat to shield her from the wind, despite her underlings watching.  Her warm breath on his neck and her mass of hair blowing into his face did a pretty good job of returning the favour.

The buggy finally slowed some forty minutes on, when the Doctor was really beginning to feel quite cold, so the humans were probably becoming blocks of ice, even bundled up as they all were.  He rubbed his gloved hands up and down River’s arms, which made static against her wool coat more than actually warmed her.  They had reached a winding dirt road that led up into hills covered with pale, brittle grass that rustled in the roaring gusts of wind.  A hanging wooden sign, creaking and swinging wildly from its post, read “Hawe Farm.”  The buggy turned onto the road and started its slow crawl up to the pasture that held the cavern entrance.

It was a bit amazing that there _were_ farms on Darillium, because it was a bit amazing that anything grew on Darillium at all.  For such a small planet— or really any size of planet— to have a 48 Earth-year day, its rotation needed to be so slow that it was _barely_ moving.  The Doctor had never seen anything like it before.  The route of its long orbit around its “sun” took Darillium through the cosmic neighbourhood of quite a few smaller white dwarfs, and, combined with its several orbiting moons and the reflective particles comprising the planet’s rings, that made much of the long night not _so_ very dark.  Like a clear night on Earth with a full moon.  And naturally there were some hardy native flora that had evolved to survive in the dim starlight.  

But the brutal winter that stretched over the long years spent in shadow, and the equally merciless summer spent in constant light, made for an extremely inhospitable planet.  Save for the milder stretches of a few years in its early morning and dusk, Darillium was a tough place for anything to live.  The Doctor and River had managed to have their own genetically modified garden for a little while, but as the night wore on and true winter set in, even that had withered.  Most of what _was_ farmed here was done in heavily insulated and fortified greenhouses.  The majority of the planet was arid, rocky, dusty and infertile.  But leave it to humans— they’d colonise anything.

He supposed it really was a bit of a shite planet for spending a couple decades romancing his wife, but it hadn’t really been up to him.  Nor had it prevented these from being the best years of his very long life.  

Except for today.  The buggy crested the hill and departed from the dirt road, dragging the wagon over a pockmarked pasture of dry grass and frosted-over mud, and knocking everyone about violently.  Archaeology was bollocks already and they weren’t even in the cave yet.  When the Doctor had been in _his_ mysterious-cavern-exploring days, they just parked the TARDIS inside, or at least right at the entrance, and no need to drag all this rubbish equipment along.  Some things, he was learning, _were_ better the long way round, but this was not shaping up to be one of them.  

The wagon finally rumbled to a stop.  A few yards away, a cluster of shaggy sheep regarded them dully.  River flashed him a little smile as she pulled out of his grasp, standing from his lap to start gathering the equipment, and suddenly the Doctor was having an even worse time.  But she didn’t have him along so he could complain in front of her students, so he swallowed down his grumpy remarks.

Not knowing what the hell to do with any of the gear, he hopped over the side of the wagon to take a look around while River called out directives for her team to prepare for the descent.  The heavily-wooled sheep were gathered round an opening in the ground, just wide enough for a couple of people to pass through at a time.  The dead grass had been cleared away around the vent, revealing where earth gave way to stone with two thick metal rings driven into it, heavy cables looped through them and extending down into the obscurity of the cavern.  A very faint light was emanating from somewhere in the depths, and even better, so was a wave of heat.  

The Doctor removed his gloves and held his hands over the opening.  The first team to survey the site had laid out a grid for the main portion of the dig and posted some torches— that would be the light he saw— so at least he wouldn’t have to suffer through that bit of archaeological dullness.  But the source of the warmth was still a minor mystery, though of course he had a theory.  And it wasn’t archaeology at all; maybe geology with a dash of physics.  Proper sciences.  He rubbed his hands together, partly to make them less numb, partly in nervous anticipation.

After all, there was a much bigger mystery he was there to solve today.

He and River volunteered to make the descent first, naturally.  They had to shed their heavy outer layers to get into the harnesses, and her teeth were actually chattering as they secured their fastenings.  But soon they’d slipped through the mouth of the cavern and were rushing down into the warm depths, their belay devices opened to a speed that was considerably faster than was at all sensible.  River grinned at him in the low light, her hair billowing around her flushed face, eyes sparking with adrenaline.  He grinned back at her, keeping pace with her reckless descent and enjoying himself nearly as much— and pushing back the thought that he’d been keeping her from this sort of thing for so long.

The cavern was immense, and, like those beneath the towers, encrusted in a layer of crystal.  Huge, rough clusters of dark amethyst points and fiery prismatic formations of citrine shone in the low torchlight as they passed.  In some places the deep purple and translucent gold blended together in a dramatic gradation, like a sunrise set in stone.

“Puts the Aplan temples to shame,” River said, voice awed.  They had both slowed their descent as they approached the bottom.  The Doctor nodded agreement.  Here was another romantic feature of this planet to share with her, at least.  But they were here to do bloody _archaeology,_ so fat lot of use it was.

The bottom of the cavern, when they reached it, was not visible stone at all, but covered in black soil that glittered ever so slightly in the torchlight.  When they had sent the harnesses back up, River reached into her pack and removed a gravity globe.  She wound her arm back and tossed it high into the cave, and a white light illuminated the crystalline walls as the globe hung suspended in the air above them.

“Nice throw,” the Doctor commented.  She smiled and moved closer, wrapping her arm around his waist.  It was just the two of them, just for a moment, in the heart of what looked like a massive, glittering geode, while the first anxious pair of students were still buckling into their harnesses far above.  He cupped her jaw and gently tilted her face up to his.  River sighed into the kiss and reached one hand up to rest at the back of his neck, welcoming him eagerly, but all too soon she was pulling away.  She gave him a half-hearted chastising look, fighting back a smile as she trailed her fingers down over his collarbone— a habitual holdover from when she’d always been adjusting his bow tie.  He kind of loved that, a bit.

“Now, darling, I hope you’re not planning on distracting me from my work.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, dear,” he replied with a grin.

 _“Hm,”_ she said sceptically, with a look that said she knew much better.

“So, what do you think of the cave?” the Doctor asked.

River looked around, switching instantly into ‘on’ mode— something they hadn’t done in quite a while.  “Well, I’d say there’s definitely volcanic activity.”

“'Course,” he agreed.  “Amethyst and citrine, common igneous formations, and look at the ground.”

“Volcanic soil; maybe that’s why they actually manage to grow anything on this farm.”

“Makes sense.  And it is toasty down here.  But it’s not a lava cave, it’s a normal cavern formation.”

“We must be adjacent to a magma reservoir.”

“Hadn’t heard anything about there being a cone nearby.  Maybe it’s part of a monogenetic field.”

“Ooh, _yes—_ little magma pockets all about.  That might account for this whole _area_ being an agricultural hub.”

“Probably none of the vents have been active since well before human colonisation.”

“Which brings us back to the archaeological component,” River said smugly, and the Doctor scowled.  She gestured to the survey site beginning a few yards ahead, where a grid had been created with twine strung across thin stakes.  There were indeed a few non-organic looking items peeking through the soil.

The next pair of the team were touching down behind them, laden with gear, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the crystal-coated walls.

“Right,” River called to them in her cheery-but-commanding tone, “let’s set up.”

By the time the entire team had made it to the bottom, River was deep in conversation with one of them— another professor, the Doctor guessed— over diagrams of the site grid and what had been mapped so far of the extended cavern system.  The Doctor was bored out of his mind, and starting to worry about how he would escape to find whatever he was supposed to be finding here.  He started slowly edging toward the dark recesses of the unexplored portion of the caverns, trying not to draw attention to himself as he did.

“Er, Doctor, is it?”  Fuck.  One of the students, the shortish one with the dark sort of poofy hair things, had spotted him.  He turned to face them with a sigh, trying his best not to look too terrifyingly cross.

“If you don't mind, what sort of doctor are you?” she (he was pretty sure) asked in an irritatingly friendly tone.

“All sorts,” he replied gruffly.

“Archaeology?”

“Hah!” he barked out, the sound echoing through the cave before he could stifle himself, earning him a frightening glare from River.  “Eh, no,” he said in a much quieter voice, scowling and feeling a bit ashamed.  “I’m against it.”

“You’re _against_ archaeology?” she glanced pointedly in River’s direction, a little smirk tugging at her lips.

“Yes, well.”  He followed her gaze, mind drifting far from the conversation at hand.  “‘The heart wants what it wants— or else it does not care.’  And I’ve got two." 

“What?” 

He remembered he was talking to someone and flushed, giving the student the stern eyebrows so she’d stop looking at him with that face his companions always got.  He was not likeable.  People needed to stop bloody liking him.  

“I’m supervising,” he bit out.

“Oh?  What qualifies you for that, then?”

 _“Skills,”_ he said, no longer attempting to hide any bit of his exasperation.  “Go on and bugger off to your grave-robbing.”

She still had that cheeky face on when she turned to rejoin the group.

The first item that they took sodding _ages_ to uncover from the dirt was some kind of extremely heavy, matte black section of tubing.  That was a bit weird.  He crept up behind where River was knelt in the soil and there was a dual echo of their sonics activating at the same time.  She gave him an exasperated glare over her shoulder and he shrugged, mouthing ‘I’m helping!’

“Dwarf star alloy,” she said, sounding duly surprised.

“But it’s been here way too long,” he chimed in, likely before she could say just the same, “fifteen _billion_ years, bloody hell.  Didn’t even know the planet was that old.”

River was giving him a look.  And it wasn’t just her “you interrupted me being clever at my job” look.

‘It wasn’t me!’ he mouthed, gesturing silently.

But, fuck.  It probably was.

The next few artefacts were all made of the same alloy, which made sense; after fifteen billion years, there wouldn’t be anything else left.  There were a lot of mechanical bits and bobs.  Some type of computer chip, it looked like, with whatever non-dwarf star pieces it once had long rusted away.  A length of cables with frayed wires at the ends.   _Conductive dwarf star alloy wires?_  If this _was_ him, the Doctor was pretty impressed with himself.  Although he’d left quite a mess, and that wasn’t his style— at least not when he could help it.  But, he supposed, it got them down here… 

River bloody well knew it, too.  She was keeping up the pretence of thoroughly cleaning, examining and cataloguing the pieces (the most agonisingly slow process the Doctor had ever been forced to witness) but she kept giving him unfriendly glances.  Which was hardly fair; he hadn’t even done it yet.

Well, if she knew it was him, she knew he had to figure out what the hell he was doing here.  He crept off into the unlit portion of the cave, hugging a gem-encrusted wall as it curved around out of sight of the dig.  He switched on his torch, and saw that the way turned down into what looked quite like a steep, roughly-hewn stair in the stone matrix.  He really hoped he wasn’t going to have to carve a fucking staircase.

Out of habit more than expecting it to be of much use, he pointed the sonic at the void beyond his torchlight.  As the buzzing tone echoed through the corridor, the walls began to glow.  

Light pulsed behind the amethyst and citrine like a heartbeat, painting the way down the rough stair in waves of ethereal colours.  

“Huh,” said the Doctor.  

He switched off his torch and began his descent.

He wasn’t sure how deep he’d travelled before the path levelled out, but he did know it was getting bloody hot; he was likely approaching one of the magma pockets.  After a narrow corridor, the walls opened up again into a little rounded grotto.  There was, indeed, a thin seam of orange-red glaring through a crevice in the cavern floor.  He shone the sonic at it from a distance.  Rhyolitic; at least it was on the cool side, as magma went.  

And then there was an ominous “gloop.”  The Doctor looked with dread into the magma seam, preparing to make an undignified dash up the stairs.  But the level wasn’t rising or spilling over— it was falling, discharging somewhere below.  He shone the sonic again.  Somewhere in the depths of the magma pocket, it detected dwarf star alloy.  Quite an incredible amount of it, stretching _far_ below the cave system.  And by far, that was to say, to perhaps somewhere between the little planet’s mantle and outer core.  

Draining down the magma in careful slow bursts, over billions and billions of years; slowly cooling the swirling molten metal of the planet's inner core into an ever more viscous and sluggish substance.  Ever so gradually, slowing the momentum that caused the planet’s rotation.  Slowing it, he was sure, to about the lowest speed it could possibly go without the planet becoming too hot or too cold to be able to support life at all.

 

_“How long is a night on Darillium?”_

_“Twenty-four years.”_

 

Yeah.  This was him.

So he was responsible for this little planet being complete shite.  Worth it, though.

 

The Doctor was prepared to turn around, return to the dig site, and accept his wife’s lecture (but, to be fair, she blew up all of time to stop him dying, so this really wasn’t so bad in comparison.)  But, he realised, he had absolutely not the faintest fucking idea of how he was going to accomplish this utterly absurd feat.  And River in his dream had hinted he would find something here to help him save her.  Not just to assure they had these twenty-four years, but to bring her back, after.  There had to be something more to find. 

He scanned along the wall of the chamber, looking for anything out of the usual.  He soniced every sodding crystal point.  There had to be something.  Something important. He couldn't afford to miss it. He began to pace frantically.  

_Think, think, think!_

He conked his head against a flat chunk of citrine in frustration.  It lit up.

“Really, headbutt telepathy?  I know this wasn’t fucking Bow Tie,” the Doctor grumbled to himself.  At himself.

He felt along the edge of the crystal and his fingers caught on a latch.  The surface of the stone clicked open, and something small and red was gleaming inside.

All the breath rushed out of him at once.  He reached a shaking hand into the casing and carefully plucked out the Hazandra, the Ghost of Love and Wishes.

“Oh, no,” he sighed, his other hand supporting his suddenly drooping head as he hunched into the wall.  “Grant.”

 

Archaeology.  It was always bloody grave-robbing.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Update: Someone pointed out with good reason that revelation at the end there is a bit confusing so, for the purposes of this story, the Doctor met little kid Grant and visited secondary school Grant before going to Darillium, but obviously this is before the main events of Doctor Mysterio. But he is, chronologically, way in the future, past Grant's lifetime, while on Darillium. Bit timey-wimey.
> 
>  
> 
> Good gods, I had NO plans for this chapter to become what it did. Originally he was going to find the Hazandra and that's it, but then I had them actually leave the house for an extended period and spend some time in the world, so I started reading up on how the hell a planet could have a 48 year day (the answer is, as far as we know, it can't, at least by natural processes, but if it *could,* it would be a bit of a shitshow; consistent with the deserty look of Darillium, at least.) And then I was reading about hypothetical weather patterns and rocks and volcanos and well... here we are.
> 
> Comments make my life so happy, and especially would on this one as it became quite the beast and I'm not sure how to feel about it! Thanks so much for reading!


End file.
